A Boys’ Guide to Narcotizing the Pain

The boys, overgrown tykes all, seem endearingly happy in their squalid playpen of an apartment. Oh, not the three potentially suicidal brothers who share a home in “Things We Want,” Jonathan Marc Sherman’s thickly whimsical comedy of despair, which opened last night at the Acorn Theater. They’re pretty miserable.

I was talking about the actors who play them: Paul Dano, Peter Dinklage and Josh Hamilton. They’re having a fine old time. And why not?

Mr. Sherman has provided them with sloppy drunk scenes, nervous breakdowns, self-lacerating monologues with poetical flourishes, and a battery of stinging quips. It’s hard not to feel like a spoilsport in pointing out that these juicy elements never really add up to complete characters.

For a certain breed of male New Yorker — a type often found at the Tribeca Film Festival or smoking between drinks on sidewalks near Lower East Side hot spots — “Things We Want” has to have the highest cool quotient of any show in town. To begin with, it’s a production of the New Group, longtime showcase to quirky movie actors who want stage cred.

Or Mr. Hamilton, a longtime Sherman interpreter who appeared with Mr. Hawke in the smashing New Group revival of “Hurlyburly” and as part of the dream team in last year’s “Coast of Utopia.” As for the production’s sole female member, Zoe Kazan, she’s a fast-rising young actress of spiky, gamine charm, the ideal Shirley MacLaine for this latter-day Rat Pack.

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From left, Peter Dinklage, Paul Dano and Josh Hamilton in "Things We Want."Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In addition “Things We Want” has a strong sentimental charge for theater cognoscenti. It’s the first new play in nearly a decade by the 39-year-old Mr. Sherman (friend to Mr. Hawke, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Dinklage), a talented dramatist who found mainstream success before he reached the legal drinking age with “Women and Wallace” (starring Mr. Hamilton), written when he was 18.

Mr. Sherman has spoken openly of the demons — of the self-medicating variety, in particular — that kept him from writing for many years. “Things We Want” might be regarded, like many of his earlier plays, as a personal exorcism.

Fortunately, he is, at least professionally, neither a breast beater nor a whiner. His latest play shares with his earlier works (including “Wonderful Time” and “Sophistry”) an imaginative thoughtfulness in considering the urges to self-destruct and self-improve.

Unfortunately “Things We Want,” while agreeably acted and directed, feels like an internal monologue distributed among four characters. Despite their surface differences, they all sound as if they are channeling the same voice.

In plot and sensibility, “Things We Want” is a high-testosterone equivalent of “Crimes of the Heart” (scheduled for a revival later this season), Beth Henley’s play about three eccentric sisters scarred by the baffling suicide of their mother. The brothers in “Things We Want” have lost both parents, who jumped (years apart) from the same window in the apartment the grown-up boys now share. (Mr. Sherman’s mother killed herself when he was 6, and parental suicide is a recurring theme in his work.)

Each brother has his own narcotic for pain. For the brisk, clean-cut Teddy (Mr. Hamilton), the eldest, it’s the soothing bromides of Dr. Miracle, the self-help guru for whom he works. For the appropriately named Sty (an amusingly brusque Mr. Dinklage), it’s the bottle (and a talismanic bonsai tree). And for the baby brother, Charles (Mr. Dano), it’s the private club of co-dependent love.

The traumatic breakup of Charles’s last relationship has caused him to quit culinary school four months before graduating and move back in with his brothers to fester in unhappiness. (Derek McLane created the fully lived-in apartment set.) Enter Stella (Ms. Kazan), a former pianist with a nonfunctioning right hand, who lives in the same building and is the apparent answer to the lonely Charles’s prayers.

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Zoe Kazan, left, and Paul Dano in "Things We Want."Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

As befits its title, “Things We Want” includes lyrical catalogs of its characters’ desiderata (which lean toward preciousness) as well as the tools used to achieve and subvert them. Mr. Sherman has a good ear for mantras of the obsessed, from the repetition of a beloved’s name (“Zelda, Zelda, Zelda,” mutters Mr. Dano in irresistibly woebegone litany) to the self-bolstering babble of Teddy’s Dr. Miracle tapes.

All the characters have plenty of nasty but cute dialogue, garlanded with standard offbeat cultural references. (My favorite line: “Payback will be swift and smell like salmon.”) The performers, who play nicely together, deliver such lines with obvious relish.

But the play hinges on 180-degree reversals of personality that make more sense in theory than practice. As enjoyable as it is to watch Mr. Hamilton, an expert at depicting fatuity, plying his well-honed specialty in two extreme emotional keys, I didn’t buy Teddy’s wholesale transformation between Acts I and II.

But let’s consider the broader context here. Asked what would really make him happy, Mr. Dano’s Charlie answers, “I think I’d create my own little world.” Now listen to the 20-year-old Mr. Sherman, in an interview in 1988, talking about what drew him to writing plays: “The idea that I could invent my own world and tell people what to say in it.”

“Things We Want” is by no means Mr. Sherman’s best play. But it is comforting to know that his wistful belief in make-believe, and the infectious pleasures it affords, has survived.